Page 236
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Domonic" praises wind, hardship, freedom, dreamers, the grand sea, the gut as word, and a future self marked by the handwritten claim "BEEN NOT."
The page reads as a blessing that keeps revising itself at the bottom. The handwritten ending complicates praise by turning the speaker's absence or failure into part of Domonic's possible becoming.
'Domonic' is a blessing-poem addressed to a younger man, charging him with elemental steadiness: 'This wind in you now / never loose from / Skies you see yourself not to sway from.' It pictures grace under strain - 'See golden your smile melting / when you understand / hardship / for others is you east of freedom / fighting' - and gives terse martial counsel: 'Watch your forhead for the game,' 'The grand sea is better than the finest ship,' 'Your gut is your word.' The speaker witnesses on behalf of another - 'Jack saw you / The best of dreamers, the first among warrors' - before the handwritten close turns the praise inward and rueful: 'the best of / You will be what I have BEEN NOT.' That ending makes the elder's failure into the youth's promise. This reading stays provisional where the lower handwriting is concerned, since the page is reviewed-with-handwriting-ambiguity. Kept spellings 'forhead' and 'warrors' are preserved.